Halfhead

by Stuart B. MacBride

  A small camp bed sat against one wall, two pairs of chains snaking out onto the plastic-coated mattress.

  Colin’s father died from an overdose of H when the boy was eight, and after that his mother caught a bad dose of God. It just meant Colin got beaten more often.

  There was a chair in the centre of the bedroom, surrounded by plastic sheeting. Shackles were attached to the arms and legs: big ones, with locking pins down the sides.

  Colin’s mother died three and a half years later. Back on the booze, she’d slipped and fallen down the apartment block stairs. Four floors. By the time she reached the bottom she had two shattered legs, a fractured wrist and a broken neck. Colin wasn’t charged, but he went straight from the inquest to a care home.

  The troopers on the right-hand side of his screen froze and Will turned the sound up.

  Nairn said, ‘Can you hear something?’

  The camera made a slow sweep of the room. There was nowhere to hide. No cupboards, nothing under the bed.

  A hand swam into view and the picture crackled as Nairn flipped the viewing monocle into place. The screen went black, and when it faded up again the troopers were bright yellow and red balls of heat in the cold room. Another slow sweep, left to right, and then the camera stopped: there was a patch of pale orange on the wall, beneath the shelf with the skulls.

  Nairn moved forward and the image on the screen grew. There were two figures, one wrapped round the other. Will couldn’t see the hidden entrance, but Nairn obviously could—he dug his knife into a join in the wall and twisted.

  Sudden motion. Swearing. A jumble of limbs. Someone making a run for it. Shouting. The hard crackle of a Field Zapper at full charge. More shouting, the words all running together, then, ‘Jillian? Can you hear me, Jillian?’

  Jillian Kilgour, eighteen years old, was curled in a ball on the floor of the hidden alcove.

  Someone knelt down next to her and felt for a pulse. The trooper hauled her upright, cradling the young woman in his arms as he checked for wounds: making sure there was nothing life threatening. There was something wrong with the back of Jillian’s head. Will leaned forward in his chair to get a better look, but the picture was too fuzzy. He could see the trooper’s hand come away from the bulge at the base of Jillian’s skull:

  ‘What the fuck?’ The voice was low and shocked. The trooper stared at the back of the young woman’s head: ‘Oh Jesus Christ…’

  And then Jillian’s body was on the floor again, dropped so the person holding her could be sick. The eighteen-year-old just lay there, shivering quietly until someone covered her up.

  The other troopers gathered round…and then the signal died, leaving Will with nothing but angry, grey static. He didn’t need to read the duty doctor’s report on Colin Mitchell to guess what happened next. He was given a kicking. Not enough to kill him, or do any serious damage. Just enough to really hurt. The report would say he’d fallen badly when they zapped him. That he’d caught his head on the door handle. That he’d broken a rib on the occasional table. That someone had accidentally stood on his hand hard enough to dislocate all of his fingers.

  Will turned down the sound on the film window, waiting for the picture to come back while he called up the hospital report on Jillian Kilgour.

  ‘What you doing?’ Jo’s voice made him jump. He looked around and she was standing just behind the couch, looking rumpled and sleepy. She hadn’t bothered to dress.

  ‘Reading your notes on the Kilgour case.’ He pointed at the screen, there was no point in lying.

  ‘It was horrible.’ She picked the other tumbler off the tabletop. The motion was casual, but it was enough to get Will’s heart, and other parts, throbbing.

  ‘Want to talk about it?’

  Jo shook her head. ‘No.’ She pulled the top off the whisky and filled the glass halfway up.

  ‘OK.’ He switched off the screen and pushed the keyboard away. He didn’t power down the machine or close the connection, though.

  She wandered over to the patio doors and stood there, sipping her drink and staring out into the rain. Will watched transfixed. She was so unselfconscious. There was no way he could have paraded about in the nip like that. Not with the blinds open.

  ‘He fell down a bit when we arrested him.’

  Will nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Nairn was all for taking him out on the roof and seeing if the fucker could fly.’ She wrapped an arm round herself, her skin golden caramel in the reflected city light. ‘Had my vote.’

  He picked himself up out of the settee and joined her in front of the glass, slipping a hand round her waist. Jo leaned against him, her skin hot to the touch.

  ‘Jillian Kilgour was dead before we got her back to the Dragonfly. Duty doctor said she was lucky: if she’d lived she’d’ve spent the rest of her life in a tank. Neurological trauma.’ Jo sniffed and Will could see her teeth clamping down on her bottom lip again.

  She dragged in a couple of deep breaths and wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. ‘Mitchell thrummed a hole in the back of her head, just about here.’ She tapped Will’s skull at the very back, just above the line of his left ear. ‘Doctor said the hole went straight through to the prefrontal lobe. All the way through.’ She let her hand drop back to her side. ‘He used a hot-glue-gun: fixed a condom to the back of that poor girl’s head.’

  Will had a nasty feeling he knew what was coming next.

  ‘He was fucking her. In the head.’ The tears were flowing freely now. ‘He was sticking his dick in the back of that girl’s head and fucking her. It…It…He…’

  Will folded her in his arms and sank to the floor with her, rocking her back and forth until she cried herself dry.

  19

  Dawn broke, but it made little difference to the day outside. The dense clouds and pounding rain wouldn’t let the daylight through. Everything was grey and miserable.

  Will sat on his own at the dining-room table, wrapped up in his dressing gown, huddling around a hot mug of tea. He yawned. Rubbed at his gritty eyes. Sighed. It had been a long, difficult night. Jo had tossed and turned in her sleep, when she could sleep at all, and he hadn’t been much better: the nightmares were back in stomach-churning Technicolor.

  Will’s enforced compassionate leave was officially over tomorrow. He’d been looking forward to going back to work, but now that Jo was here, he found didn’t really want to. There was more to life than paperwork and crime statistics.

  At least they’d have the day together. A lazy Sunday breakfast, maybe a walk in the rain—anywhere other than Kelvingrove Park—late lunch, go do something fun. OK, so they’d have to detour past the hospital for his follow-up appointment with Doc Morrison, but other than that he had nothing on…Which was another good idea: spend the day in bed.

  He gave Jo another hour before making a pot of tea and carrying it through to the bedroom. She was already awake and half dressed. As he walked in she jumped and clutched her shirt to her chest, hiding her bra.

  ‘Will, sir, I think I—’

  He didn’t let her finish.

  ‘Before you say anything,’ he said, settling the teapot down on the bedside table, ‘I want you to know that I don’t consider last night to be a mistake. I’ve liked you since the first day we met.’ He paused and shrugged. ‘Well…except for that bit with the dismembered body in the toilet of course.’

  She kept her mouth shut, so he soldiered on.

  ‘It’s Sunday and I’d like you to spend the day with me. We could go out to Comlab Six, save the world from Martian invaders, or rampaging dinosaurs, maybe go somewhere fancy for dinner. Whatever you like.’

  She looked at him, then down at the carpet. ‘I’ve…em…got a lot of paperwork to catch up on.’

  ‘I see.’ He picked the tea up and carried it back into the living room, leaving her to finish dressing in peace.

  When Jo emerged from the bedroom five minutes later she looked ready to leave. ‘Did you mean what you said
back there?’ she asked.

  Will nodded.

  ‘I really do have a lot of paperwork to get through,’ she said, slinging her bag over her shoulder, ‘but if you like we could meet up after lunch and go save the world?’

  Will got himself another cup of tea and sank down on the couch. Smiled. She wanted to see him again. OK, so it wasn’t quite the day of indulgence and nakedness he’d been hoping for, but it was a better than nothing.

  Much better.

  So why did he still feel guilty?

  His love life had been sparse since Janet died. Three and a half years of celibacy, followed by a one-night stand with an executive from Dis-Com-Lein over on a junket from the small South African country her company owned. Her cloned, faintly oriental features had been a feature of his life for almost four whole hours. She’d phoned him a couple of times, but he never called her back. The memory of Janet was still too raw. The next two had suffered the same fate. He’d start out well enough, but in the end he just couldn’t let them in.

  Maybe six years was long enough to mourn.

  Sighing, he pulled the keyboard out from under the coffee table and powered the screen up again. He’d not had any joy finding Ken Peitai yesterday, so it was time for a different approach. Will opened up the old bonus payment he’d found.

  The digital signatures were all stored with the docket. Received by Ken Peitai. Approved by Julius Grond—PayFund Manager. Requested by Tokumu Kikan. That would make him Ken’s boss, and he obviously thought highly of him, given the number of zeroes on the deposit.

  Will leaned forward in his seat. Tokumu Kikan. He’d never heard of him, but any friend of Ken’s was a friend of his.

  He sent a cluster of stealth engines off to look for anything relating to Ken’s boss.

  Ten minutes later he was still no further forward: there was no sign of Ken or his boss in any of the government systems, other than that one bonus payment. PayFund was one of the few services every ministry shared, so that was Will’s next target.

  He called up the Network’s payment system and slipped in though a back door he wasn’t supposed to know about. From there it was a struggle to work his way back to the main PayFund servers without leaving a footprint. PayFund was a high-security system for a reason: it handled every single penny the government collected and spent. Screw around in here and you could bankrupt the whole country. They had every type of guardian software known to man in operation, all of it monitored around the clock for intruders. Which was why Will had to take it slow and careful, covering his tracks as he went.

  He slipped into the budget allocations and went looking for any mention of Ken Peitai, Tokumu Kikan or Sherman House.

  Half an hour passed and all he had to show for it was a blinding headache. He was having to work harder and harder to keep the software from finding him in its daughter’s bedroom with his pants round his ankles. If he stayed in here much longer someone was going to notice.

  Ken Peitai: one—William Hunter: nil.

  He worked his way back out of the system, making sure he’d left nothing incriminating behind, then slumped back on the sofa, massaging his eyes.

  OK. Time to try something else.

  He couldn’t find anything on the people running the Sherman House project, but what about the people they were experimenting on. The two bodies they’d dragged back from the place: Allan Brown and Kevin McEwen. Two men living two doors away from each other. One a serial killer, the other a family man who decided one morning to murder his wife and kids.

  They’d only managed to ID Allan Brown because his DNA was on file with PsychTech, but maybe there’d be something in there about Kevin McEwen as well.

  There wasn’t.

  Will swore. Then tried a couple of the other systems. As far as he could tell Kevin McEwan had been a perfectly normal citizen. Until Ken Peitai infected him with VR syndrome. So Will went back to PsychTech and called up Allan Brown’s case notes.

  There were a lot of them, just like Colin Mitchell’s, describing his development, step by step, into the monster they’d finally caught. But there were other chunks of data in the PsychTech files. Data that wasn’t meant for public consumption. Data he’d never have found without root access to the archived records. Data logged against Dr Fiona Westfield’s username.

  Damn. Every time her name came up, Will felt that familiar tightening in his stomach. And the more he read, the worse the feeling got.

  ‘Jesus…’

  Her notes detailed every session with Allan Brown’s parents: how she encouraged beatings, sexual fantasies, feelings of resentment, drug and alcohol dependence…Allan Brown was doomed from the start. Parents hate him, abuse him, leave him. Boy drifts into a violent fantasy world. Boy starts burning things. Boy starts hurting things. Boy starts killing things.

  ‘Boy ends up torn to pieces in a public toilet.’

  Will called up Colin Mitchell’s records. He found a similar set of notes, all logged by Dr Fiona Westfield as she methodically ruined Mitchell’s life.

  Everyone thought Alastair Middleton was the only monster she’d made, but now it looked as if she’d been a lot more productive. Taking vulnerable children and twisting them into carbon copies of herself.

  First thing Monday morning he’d get a team to slog through everything—see if they could spot anyone else Westfield had manipulated.

  ‘How many more of you are there? How many more of you did she make?’

  She stands outside the incubation room, pretending to clean the window, but really staring at what’s growing inside.

  It’s beautiful. Most of her new head is covered with skin: soft and pale and lovely. It hangs, suspended in its pouch of growth medium, surrounded by a nimbus of thick, golden hair. The face looks like she did when she was eighteen. Back when she was just beginning to experiment with dismemberment. Ah, to be young and innocent again…

  The nose is slightly too big, the chin slightly too wide—the way it was before Daddy paid for that little round of cosmetic surgery. Helping nature on the way to perfection.

  Her heart tingles as she watches her new face floating there. Tonight Dr Stephen Bexley will make sure she can speak, and eat, and look just like a real person.

  Tonight she gets her human mask back.

  She finishes wiping the glass and drops the rag back into the wheely’s cleanbox.

  Time to make sure everything is arranged.

  She pushes into the good doctor’s office, pulling her mop and bucket behind her. When he sees her he flinches. He’s lost weight over the last two days; dark circles shroud his bloodshot, grey eyes. He has always had beautiful eyes. It seems to take him a minute to figure out whether this is really her or just some brain-dead, menial slave. She sees the sweat prickling on his face. He knows who she is.

  Dr Westfield pulls the datapad from her pocket and presses a button. ‘WELL?‘ it says in its flat, artificial voice.

  ‘Theatre Six: half past eleven.’ Stephen fumbles with the pens on his desk. ‘It’s the earliest I could get without anyone seeing.’

  ‘ACCEPTABLE.‘

  He rubs a hand across his face. ‘I…I’m not sure that I can do the whole procedure on my own.’

  He wants someone to hold his hand. Share the honour.

  ‘I mean…I mean who’s going to assist? Who’s going to handle the anaesthetics? I can’t do everything! What if something goes wrong?’ There are tears dribbling down his cheeks and she wonders if she’s pushing him too hard. Perhaps she should have sprung the operation on him at the last minute, instead of giving him time to worry. He’s obviously terrified for his family, not been sleeping. Panicking. Imagining his pregnant wife being skinned alive.

  Hmm…Dr Westfield frowns. A miscalculation on her part: she needs him at his best, not exhausted. But it’s too late to worry about that now.

  Her fingers dance over the keypad.

  ‘IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG YOUR WIFE DIES.‘

  ‘But I—’

&nb
sp; She punches the ‘speak’ button again:

  ‘IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG YOUR WIFE DIES.‘

  He buries his head in his hands and cries.

  ‘MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS READY. WE START AT ELEVEN THIRTY PROMPT.‘

  She steps back from the desk and stares at him. Snivelling like a frightened child. Disgusting. Weak.

  When she kills him—after he’s fixed her face—she’ll be doing him a favour. A long, slow, painful favour.

  ‘DO NOT DISAPPOINT ME, STEPHEN,’ says the datapad in her hands. ‘YOU WILL NOT LIVE TO REGRET IT IF YOU DO.‘

  He won’t live anyway, but sometimes a little hope can go a long way.

  They stood beneath the awning of a burger van, sheltering from the pounding rain, eating cloned-meat patties and overcooked onions. George was tucking into his with relish. Brian ate his with tomato sauce. Will peered at his suspiciously, as if a cat had just crapped in it.

  ‘So what’s the verdict then?’ said Brian between chews.

  ‘I found out who Ken’s boss was six and a bit years ago. Other than that: nothing. It’s like they don’t even exist.’

  ‘How can there be nothin’? No one’s invisible these days, no’ even ministry spooks.’

  ‘They’ve got no Social records, nothing in the Services database and, other than one hefty bonus, bugger all in PayFund either. I couldn’t even find a budget allocation for Peitai’s project at Sherman House.’

  ‘And you’re sure they’re no’ corporate?’

  Will nodded. ‘No private company’s got enough clout to keep something this big a secret.’

  Brian growled and bit into his bun. ‘If they’re no’ on the official budgets, they’re dark funds. That makes ‘em Special Ops, or SIS, or some covert department shite.’

  George raised an eyebrow, grease glossing his chin. ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘Aye, them bastards don’t play by the rules. I used to go out with a guy worked Special Ops—this was years ago mind, just after they’d won the World War Cup: everyone wanted tae shag a soldier—he used to brag about what they did tae people what got in their way. Thought it wis sexy. We’re gonnae have to go real careful here: even if we get proof…They’ll bury us, literally.’